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Areca high-performance ARC-1680 series PCIe to SAS RAID host controller can provide up to (128) SAS/SATA ll peripheral devices using SAS expanders. The controllers are based on the same RAID kernel of field-proven external RAID adapters and same device drivers with widely used SATA RAID controllers. Applications that benefit most from these controllers include NAS, server RAID solutions, web servers, supercomputing, near-line backup, security systems and streaming applications.

Serial Attached SCSI Ports With one external mini-SAS port and six internal mini-SAS ports, the Areca ARC-1680IX-24-4G supports up to 128 SAS or SATA devices (with expander) for enhanced flexibility and speed.

Manufacturer Warranty

Parts

3 years limited

Labor

3 years limited

Quick Info

WarrantyBeyond any applicable Newegg return policy, this item is warranted independently by the product's Manufacturer or a Third party. Below is a summary provided for convenience only and may not be accurate or current.
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Rating: 5/5Works like a champ!

Pros: This card runs like a champ. I own a ARC-1680IX-24-4G, ARC-1680IX-12 and an ARC-1222 and all of them are amazing. I've also used them with Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Windows 7 Pro, Windows XP and Win 2008 R2. Only one time have I seen the problem mentioned below regarding a Linux box having an issue w/ the Areca driver and the box did inexplicably reboot. I've since copied tons of data over to it w/ out issue. I'm literally using this card, Linux and SCST to make a home made SAN. It runs rock solid and I haven't had any issues. It runs so well, that we also use it at work and have literally saved thousands compared to the Dell solution they quoted us.

Cons: I did try playing around w/ the SAS Expander port on the back but had no love. I don't care what settings I tried using on the SAS console port, it didn't matter (you can change the cable length parameters for your SAS Expander cable via CLI.) Because I couldn't get it to work, I've now got an HP SAS Expander card sitting on the self and finally decided to just upgrade to this card versus the 12 port card.

Other Thoughts: The card has an out-of-band Cat5 port on it for remote management. It's amazing. You can setup, SNMP, email alerts, completely rebuild your array; it is truly awesome! I now refuse to use my Adaptec cards!

Rating: 2/5Areca Problems with Linux

Pros: -Good value for the money-Decent driver support under windows, but a inconsistent with Centos Linux (reproducible crashing under load).

Cons: It's been a challenge to get tech support for this product on linux - from Areca or Red Hat. There is only one Areca tech support person available in the US, and they don't have a lot of linux experience. We are working with them but it is unclear if they will be able to resolve the issue.

Other Thoughts: We run Centos version 5.5 (64bit) on areca 1680ix-24-4G and 1680ix-12-4G cards with 1TB seagate hard drives. We've updated the firmware on the cards, the driver in the OS, and the firmware on the drives to the latest available. The OS driver came from the author's website--I believe he is an Areca employee.

We can reproducibly crash the system on a 6-disk raid-5 array by writing a 1GByte large file to the array. It also crashes sometimes under normal file-serving load, so it is not just a problem in testing. However, writing more slowly and reading fast do not seem to cause problems.

Cons: The price for the 4Gb cache is what makes this jump so high since DDR2 prices have risen from supply and demand, plus getting 1 stick that is 4GB ddr2 is expensive.

Other Thoughts: I have multiple systems with this card and 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. 40TB in a raid6 formatted NTFS under windows 2008 R2. These arrays are very fast getting around 1.3 to 1.6 GByte/s sequential reads and writes.

Rating: 3/5Not sure...

Other Thoughts: $1500 for a card? Yikes. I can get a nice mobo, Xenon and ram for this cost, and make the whole thing a "raid card" NAS/SAN. I guess i realy dont get the whole raid card thing. I can just throw another mobo at it for a lot less. What am i missing out on raid card owners?

0 out of 28 people found this review helpful.
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